Controlling bosses cause poor work

Let’s have no failure to communicate: stay down until you finish the job

A boss gets things done through others. An ability to influence others to meet a goal is critical to get things accomplished. Some call management influence, others call management coercion.

Influence or coercion, controlling bosses cause employees to strive towards goals that are opposite to the boss.

Bosses are managers, bosses manage resources: time, money, and employees, are each finite resources.

Employees value freedom and autonomy and will react to a boss with poor work. A Duke University study looked at significant others and the impact a significant other, to include a boss, has on goals. As little as a subliminal flash of the name of the controlling ‘other’ was enough to produce poorer work.

There is a psychological mechanism that connects the love of freedom and the behavioral response, this mechanism: reactance.

Unconscious and unintentional rejection of goals [that status report that you asked for] have association to overbearing people. A rejection of a goal [that presentation you need to review] reveals itself as a goal in opposition.

It’s all too easy, once people become managers, for them to forget how deeply their employees value freedom and autonomy, and the extent to which some of them [the employees] … react to any infringement of it, even unconsciously.